Here's a write-up on Willow Creek Academy. As residents of Marin City (the other side the Sausalito tracks, so to speak) we wrestled with public vs. private before choosing this public charter school. Dane will attend Kindergarten there this Fall; Aubs will start in '07.

WILLOW CREEK ACADEMY, 2001
Facilities are a challenge for most charter schools, some of which occupy church basements or storefronts. Instead of having to scramble for a home, Willow Creek is lodged in the spiffy upper half of the Bayside School campus. The classrooms were to be a middle school when the handsome facilities were built 10 years ago. But the middle school wound up in Marin City. Instead, Willow Creek, chartered by the district, moved into the classrooms next to Bayside Elementary. Like many charter startups, Willow Creek adds a grade each year. It is now K-7 and will top out with an eighth grade next school year. Willow Creek has 105 students, the same as K-6 Bayside next door, with which there is delicate coexistence.

For half a century the Sausalito Marin City School District has struggled with having one foot in predominantly white Sausalito and the other in predominantly black Marin City. Many Sausalito parents who could afford to do so sent their kids to private schools, leaving the district with lots of money (two or three times as much per pupil as the rest of Marin), lots of problems (ranging from discipline to test scores) and lots of tension. Willow Creek was founded by Sausalito parents who wanted to re-establish publicly funded education as a core civic virtue rather than as a source of enduring dispute.

Head of school is Carol Cooper who, like the administrators of Marin’s other charter schools, has a remarkably strong educational background. Cooper has degrees from Oberlin, the University of Chicago and UC Berkeley; worked 18 years in the Marin County schools office; took off five years to try her hand at the flower business (Hastings and Hastings in Mill Valley); and four years ago went back to what she loves most—education. Willow Creek has a strong academic focus that features project-based, interdisciplinary learning. About 80 percent of the diverse student body is from the Sausalito district.

Here's a brief analysis of Willow Creek and the other three charter schools in Marin county. Marin’s four charter schools are clearly different, but in three big ways they are quite alike:

1. Small size. Although student-teacher ratios at Marin charters are about average for California public schools, the charter schools themselves are relatively small, from 25 students at Phoenix Academy to 243 at Novato Charter. Every study since Roger Barker and Paul Gump’s groundbreaking work in 1964 (Big School, Small School) has agreed that small schools are superior to large ones in nearly all aspects: attendance, student involvement, academic achievement, the serving of minorities—the works. At Marin’s small charters the kids say they feel valued, there are no dismissive cliques and drug use is either a small problem or no problem at all.

2. Strong parent involvement. At Willow Creek Academy and Novato Charter School, parents must sign on the dotted line and pledge many volunteer hours of work. Parent involvement at MSAT and Phoenix Academy is less structured, but firmly expected. In the broader educational universe, a huge factor in any school’s success appears to be parent involvement. When Bill Honig was superintendent of Marin’s Reed School District, and before he became state superintendent, parent involvement was significant as he propelled Reed from a good district to a great one.

3. Rampant enthusiasm. Almost without exception, the charter kids love the teachers, the teachers love the kids, administrators are friends rather than scary figures and parents feel good, too. Sometimes kids don’t fit. But as four MSAT 10th graders explained, “Some kids aren’t here by choice…Their parents forced them, but they get weeded out…It’s usually mutual. At the end of last year there were kids who didn’t want to come back, so they were replaced and so the 10th grade class now is really just a great group.” The replacement process is a luxury not available at traditional public schools. Kids who don’t want to be there are usually forced to be there anyway.

Source: http://www.pacificsun.com/marinscharters.html